Let’s not send a few thousand people to Mars as a big experiment in survival.
The authors of the book in the article, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, were also on an episode of Factually. Between this article and that episode, I’m pretty down on any cool scifi future in space.
It absolutely does.
Exactly who does it and how it’s responded to are incredibly important for the future of space.
Sure. Not necessary for the existential risk to be dire.
Yes, something which carries inherent and extreme inherent risk as the effort required to toss one into earth’s gravity well is essentially the same as putting it anywhere else.
I certainly imagine you’re not trying to implicate me with that one.
None of those are likely reasons for asteroid wrangling. You’re better off settling the bottom of the ocean. Literally. So much better off. As much as this idea of building radiation bombarded, almost entirely medically unresearched, cramped, expensive beyond belief space stations sounds nice, we’re probably better off spending those dollars just building more apartments and improving farming technologies for a while. There’s no conceivable future where building space settlements solves a single current day issue.
There is not a single resource in space valuable enough to justify mining it. Asteroids with ppm concentrations of ore are good only for settlers because it’s that hard to get resources out to them across the months those voyages would take from earth.
Asteroids only really look like a valid resource when you’re building a dyson swarm and you’re not excited about peeling off the earth’s crust.